The Admirable Legacy of Arsène Wenger

Arsène Wenger gestures as Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, of Arsenal, comes on during Sunday’s Premier League match against West Ham United.

Photograph by Shaun Botterill / Getty

When Arsène Wenger was hired to manage Arsenal, in 1996, many fans and followers of the North London club viewed the lanky, refined Frenchman with bemusement. In the early days of the Internet and satellite cable, English football was still a fairly provincial game, typified by a brawling, pugnacious spirit. Wenger, who had managed in Monaco and Nagoya, Japan, brought new ideas about how the game should be played, and what kinds of players the club should pursue and develop. There was a meticulousness in his approach that extended to how the players took care of themselves. “I think in England you eat too much sugar and meat and not enough vegetables,” he told reporters. At the time, players were more accustomed to pre-match chocolate bars than to individually tailored nutritional regimes or post-game massages. If Wenger’s players insisted on taking sugar with their coffee, he reportedly recommended a particular stirring technique to insure that all of the granules properly dissolved.

Last week, Wenger announced that he would be stepping down from his position at the end of this season, after twenty-two years in charge of Arsenal. It was partly seen as a face-saving measure; fans and club executives alike have been wondering whether Wenger’s innovations had run their course. It was an impressive course: Wenger is one of the most successful managers in English history—his teams have won three league titles and seven FA Cups. In 2003 and 2004, his team captivated the soccer world by going on a forty-nine-match unbeaten streak, becoming the first English team since the eighteen-eighties to go through an entire season without a loss. But statistics and trophy tallies don’t quite capture his influence.

A year before Wenger got the job, a European Court decision, which became known as the “Bosman ruling,” radically changed soccer’s labor market. Before Bosman, English soccer still allowed quotas on the number of foreigners a team could field, and “free agents” of any nationality who were out of contract still belonged to their clubs, unable to sign elsewhere. Bosman changed all this, and Wenger anticipated what these changes meant, helping accelerate soccer’s embrace of globalization. Arsenal became famous for finding young talent all over the planet—particularly throughout Africa and the African diaspora. When, in 2005, Arsenal fielded an entire squad, including substitutes, without an Englishman, it didn’t seem mercenary so much as evolutionary.

The following year, an Arsenal lineup featured eleven players from eleven different countries. At the team’s peak, Arsenal’s players shared an ethos that was free-flowing, flexible, and communal, radically changing the reputation of a club once associated with a hard-nosed pragmatism. This is another way of saying that Wenger’s teams could be cool, in a way that translated beyond borders, language, and history. His best teams were beloved around the world for their fluid, occasionally gorgeous style. It was as though they were trying to score the prettiest, most elaborate goals possible.

Over time, many of Wenger’s once zany-seeming ideas about fitness regimens and the global talent pool have been absorbed into the soccer mainstream. He inflected Arsenal with a kind of cosmopolitan marketing cachet, signing exhilarating young players and moving the club from the cozy, ninety-three-year-old Highbury Stadium to the state-of-the-art Emirates Stadium, in 2006. These maneuvers have been widely imitated. But Wenger’s tendency toward fiscal prudence—last year, Arsenal was the sixth-most profitable club in the world—has left his team lagging behind such rivals as Manchester City, Manchester United, and Chelsea, who luxuriate in the new realities of skyrocketing salaries, king-making agents, and transfer fees. Wenger’s reluctance to dive headlong into the financialization of soccer speaks to a kind of core integrity, as well as a sense of job security; after all, he enjoyed a stellar run turning talented youngsters—Thierry Henry, Patrick Vieira, Cesc Fàbregas—into stars. (The average Premier League manager survives less than two years, so it’s generally better to make moves than to patiently stay the course.)

Managers are often judged by their ability to impress a personal style—sometimes literally—upon their players. Some demand sacrifice, a stifling of solo flair in the name of team pragmatism. Others manage from the heart, offering their players free license to express themselves. Wenger’s teams have always seemed cultured and sophisticated, hard-wired to entertain and delight. “The moral values I’ve learnt in my life I’ve learnt through football,” he once said. “As a club we have an educational purpose, to give back to those people who love Arsenal so that they learn moral values from our game and how we behave.”

But, in recent years, far removed from Arsenal’s glory days, Wenger’s teams have come to seem twinkly and fussy, lacking the cunning and toughness necessary in moments of crisis. At some point during the past few years, his total commitment to the ideals of beautiful play began to feel naïve, as though this were art for art’s sake. It is the fatal side of romance. Would you rather win, or dream your way to oblivion?

As someone who has rooted against Arsenal for years, I feel safe professing admiration for Wenger now that he is on the way out. The team’s lack of recent success has made it easier to admire his virtues, maybe even sympathize with Arsenal’s coming upheaval. When Alex Ferguson left Manchester United—the club I support—in 2013, after twenty-six years in charge, he left behind a vacuum that will probably never adequately be filled. During their tenures, Ferguson and Wenger were living monuments from a different, seemingly pre-modern era, when it seemed like strong-willed individuals could resist or at least harness the forces of global change.

On Sunday, Arsenal hosted West Ham, whose current manager, David Moyes, replaced Ferguson at Manchester United. (He lasted just ten months there.) During the match, an air of uncertainty hung over the Emirates crowd. Fans, relieved from conflicted feelings about their club’s greatest-ever manager, could shower Wenger with their full-throated appreciation, but they rarely did. The match was filled with effervescent sequences that amounted to little, reminders of why people felt ambivalence about Wenger in the first place—and reminders, too, of the challenge facing Arsenal’s next boss.

In the eighty-second minute, with the match tied 1–1, Arsenal’s Welsh midfielder, Aaron Ramsey, curled the ball toward goal, hoping to find the Gabonese forward Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang. But Aubameyang—and, more important, the nearest West Ham defender—ducked out of the way, and Ramsey’s ball unexpectedly bounced into the back of the net. A team of meticulous craftsmen, and a fluke goal: it seemed a funny way to start Wenger’s farewell tour. A couple of minutes later, Arsenal attacked again, with more confidence and flair this time, as though they were playing an elegant game of hot potato, and their French forward Alexandre Lacazette fizzed in another goal from a few yards out. Victory safely in hand, Arsenal surged forward one last time, and some nimble footwork from Ramsey resulted in another goal from Lacazette. A dull afternoon had ended with a 4–1 scoreline, and the remaining fans finally sang out: “There’s only one Arsène Wenger.”

Hua Hsu began contributing to The New Yorker in 2014, and became a staff writer in 2017.